The repeated sensationalized portrayal of Roman martyr Saint Sebastian has created a powerful iconography. Fascination with Sebastian, spanning throughout the Renaissance to the early modern poets, is a direct result of his sexualized depiction at the scene of his execution. Mannerist painters found a fashionable erotic interest in him by utilizing portraiture as a pretext for homoerotic appeal, painting him in a conventionally effeminate style with an ecstatic expression, whereas poets found a sense of perverse righteousness at his "honorable" death. His beauty incites passion, empathy, and an overwhelming sense of pathos. This article examines the link between martyrdom and sexuality in sociological, philosophical, and artistic contexts.

Italian Renaissance

Religious Art

Iconography

European Art

Saint Sebastian

Guido Reni

Jacopo Pontormo

Pietro Perugino

Poetry

The agonizing yet divinely ecstatic martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, shown in both
pious and sensual lights, has become a hugely prevalent and recognizable
pictorial event in both historical and modern society. His iconographic journey flows through the Middle Ages, the early Italian Renaissance,
English aestheticism, and early modern poetry - always depicted in reference to
the scene of his attempted martyrdom, in which he is pierced by multiple Roman
arrows. Beyond his established stance of celebrity in European culture,
Sebastian’s popularity makes him and the moment of his agony a sexual trope in
visual and literary art. For many aesthetic and humanistic reasons, his
depiction has grown such, but the particular instance of sensationalized
martyrdom, repeated so many times in the hands of so many artists, links
eroticism to death by philosophy and sociology.

Early modern morality, whether personally
based upon the Old Testament or not, resolves to a general consensus that “Thou shalt not kill.” Death has been a point of fascinated horror and
irresistible repulsion since the first evidence of burial ceremonies.1 Humanity sees its inevitable decay; the individual has
their own downfall reflected in their eyes as fated and inescapable. An attempt
is made to remove man from violence, from blood (from any bodily fluid in
extremities), an impossible goal that ends in failure at each death, especially
each intentional one. A taboo is created - perpetual, rooted in horror. The
popular distinction between human and non-human animal, in which animals are
considered (whether unfairly so or not) to be inferior in civilization and
intelligence, is made. Non-human animals, in their historically biased
interpretation, are carnal and freely sexual, as well as freely violent.
Humans, however, stand ashamed before the supposed demands of nature or, in
some sociological scenarios, God, and so the limitation and condemnation is
required to ease human fear and embarrassment.

The
necessities of nature are not restricted to death, but extend to specific areas
of transgression when it occurs. Martyrdom, sacrifice, and even suicide
constitute given categories which are, historically, avoided in public
discussion. While these specifics vary contextually, the construction of
taboos, whatever they surround, is universal. Still more condemnable than
killing, however, is sex. While in certain situations these seem paradoxical -
sexual functions can reproduce life, murder ends it - they are intertwined and
intimately (in all definitions of the word) related. There is not a necessary
terror to be found involving sexual conduct; it is potentially one of the most
natural and vital occurrences in human existence. Because the remarkably
widespread aversion to sexuality lacks a natural justification, the taboo can
be established as a social product. Logical reasoning behind the proscription
of sex may be non-existent save for tradition, deeply bound in religious
contexts, exemplified in Abrahamic faiths specifically. Yet another commandment
lends itself to said customs, having set a moral and social guideline rooted in
the oldest civilizations: “Thou shalt not perform the carnal act.”

Though the
classical era is, at first glance and by the common perception, brimming with
sexual liberty, Greco-Roman restrictions of erotic practice and bigoted
condemnation of feminization present an entirely contrary, sometimes shocking
truth. Antiquity has frequently been labeled the holy grail of sexual
acceptance, considering the profusion of homosexuality and the reverent light
in which it was cast. It must be recognized that this assumed equality and
social progress is a courtesy extended only to men, and, often, only to their
romantic or ‘pure’ relationships. The Grecian ideal has erected its own taboos
forbidding abasement and their idea of obscenity. John Addington Symonds
describes two loves in his A Problem in
Greek Ethics, a celestial Achillean love, Ouranios (the love of heroes), and a vulgar sexuality, Pandemos.2 Even the (colloquially) most carnally equitable people
circumscribed sexuality and classified it as licentious.

In a
heteronormative setting, sex and subsequent childbirth associated with it may
have evolved to be restricted due to simply the amount of blood and death (as
violence is taboo) surrounding bearing children. Misogynistic suppression of
female sexuality plays its role as well, and the pleasure and autonomy of woman
is stripped so she may become merely the possession, the sexual and
reproductive property no less, of her
husband.

Regardless
of the motives for creating prohibitions on sexuality and fatality, the two
subjects are inherently connected because of the embedded social attitude they
share. With this knowledge, the eroticization of death is expected and no
longer absurd. Taboos, though constructed to limit and prevent transgressors,
only excite the urge to commit whatever apparently horrendous act these moral,
social, or legal expectations disdain. They are “founded on terror,”3 and made to gloriously and publicly curse sexuality and
violence, and to use fear as a tool effecting obedience.

Laws are
temptations - barriers - waiting to be overturned, inviting illicit activity.
To forbid an action ensures its abundant occurrence. Banning sexuality, banning
violence, and villainizing suicide, and in doing so bonding the three sins as
one, creates an unexpected appeal of eroticism and death, specifically allowing
oneself to be slain - by one's own hand or any other force of arrows. Religious
and honorary sacrifices, such as the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, are
perpetually intertwined with sexual interpretations and depictions.

Saint
Sebastian is one of the most massively iconographic, and hugely sexualized,
mythological figures in European culture. He, a third century Christian convert
and soldier of Roman emperor Diocletian, is condemned to die at the hands of
archers for leading other Romans to Christianity, generally appearing tethered
to a tree with only a sheer cloth around his waist and arrow shafts embedded
under pale skin. Through writings of Jacobus de Voragine, Sebastian, born in
Narbonne and educated in Milan, came into the clear favor of the Roman despots.
When he betrayed Diocletian and Emperor Maximilian by converting their armies,
they were “angry and wroth, and commanded him to be led to the field and there
to be bounden to a stake for to be shot at.”4 Due to the intervention of Saint Irene, he was tenderly
cured and returned to defy Diocletian. Irate that the traitor had not been
killed, the emperor ordered his men to beat him and leave him for effective
dead; this time, Diocletian succeeds.

From his
sixth century depiction as a middle-aged, bearded man to his Renaissance and
post-Renaissance portrayal as an Apollonian youth, Sebastian has been painted
by artists from Mantegna and Il Sodoma to Nicolas Regnier. His most common
image, the writhing boy nude in agony (and conceivably ecstasy), is an
obviously sensual one. In most cases, drawing a saint - especially their
martyrdom - was a legitimate excuse to safely fantasize and appreciate erotic
beauty. Just as Venus became the standard subject for self-indulgent female
nudes, Sebastian became an artist's resort for male appreciation and socially
excusable homosexuality. This attraction and fascination, thinly veiled in
erudition by the classical obsessions of humanists, could be justified in both
artistic and religious social categories.

With
rising humanist philosophy and newfound Grecian fascination, the late
fourteenth century brought a catalyst to the Italian Renaissance and an
iconographic era of Saint Sebastian as a desirable figure. Artists eagerly
explored the scandalous freedom and glory of the nude, but the overzealous
presence of the Catholic Church in Italy reprimanded the sacrilege of indecent
portrayals of holy icons. For Pope Clement VIII in 1592, Saint Sebastian was
the worst of these violations. Scarcely dressed male saints - the most terrible kind, for
female sexual autonomy and homosexuality on all accounts were, and are,
severely condemnable - lead to corruption of heart, unfocused worship, and a
great deal of confusion for any poor sinner lead astray by the seductive charm
of classical nudity. This may feasibly have occurred, as Giorgio Vasari creates
an arguably truthful anecdote in
which:

[Fra Bartolommeo] painted a picture of St. Sebastian, naked, very lifelike in
coloring of the flesh, sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with
corresponding beauty of person.... the friars found, through the confessional,
women who had sinned at the sight of it, on account of the charm and melting
beauty of the lifelike reality imparted to it by the genius of Fra Bartolommeo;
for which reason they removed it from the church.5

In
response to this heretic distraction, Clement VIII lead a campaign against
nakedness and sexuality in religious art on the grounds that it was profane
and did not accurately reflect the pain of these saviors. He proposed a specific taboo, circumscribed art - especially compellingly and urgently
classical art - and doing so invited his blaspheming painters to disobey. As
the Marquis de Sade insists, “The best way of enlarging and multiplying one's desires
is to try to limit them.”6 Indeed, Fra Bartolommeo’s saint is scantily clad and his
skin possesses a soft tangibility that immediately evokes the later Titian.

The most
notable early Renaissance representations of Saint Sebastian are Andrea
Mantegna's trio of paintings. For this purpose, the St. Sebastian of the Musée du Louvre and Kunsthistorisches Museum
will be analyzed. In these two paintings, Sebastian is bound to a classical
column (fig. 1).

This deteriorating Roman construction (though Sebastian would have been
killed during the age of ancient Rome) can be interpreted as a symbol of the
ruins of paganism. Rising from antique religion is a new age of Christianity,
heralded by the death of Sebastian.

Both of
Mantegna's figures are naked except for a tied cloth around their groin.
Sebastian pushes his shoulders back and displays his chest while his hips sit
slanted with weight on one leg. The lack of hair on Sebastian's body gives him a youthful and
conventionally effeminate look, which, with his curled hair, makes him a figure
to rival the god Apollo.

Similarities
between Apollo and Sebastian extend beyond their physical appearance. Sebastian
is the patron saint of the plague-stricken and Apollo the deity of disease. Both
are used by artists as vessels through which naked androgynous beauty is
conveyed. This observation adds another layer to the symbolism of Mantegna's
ancient ruins - Sebastian is an allegory for Apollo, and Christianity building
off of paganism.

Saint
Sebastian was frequently painted as a thinly veiled excuse to artistically dote
on the male form. Because he is a holy figure whose death for God is the story
depicted by these artists, they could easily defend the level of adoration paid
to him. In fact, the expectation was that he would be romanticized in visual
portrayals, so taking his death a step further and eroticizing it is not a
great leap. Agnolo Bronzino's Sebastianin the Museo Thyssen sits with the shaft of a broken arrow
penetrating his chest and his pink robe sliding off his torso onto his lap (fig. 2).

Unlike the common trope of an agonized, arguably ecstatic expression,
Bronzino's portrait turns away from the viewer, smiling as if conducting a
leisurely conversation. He is completely unfazed by the weapons of his
martyrdom still embedded in his flesh. This pose of indifference to his story
combines with the revealing title of the work - Portrait of a Young Man as Saint Sebastian - to prove beyond doubt
that Bronzino pays little care to the Christian narrative he pretends to tell,
and instead employs the subterfuge of the saint to admire a beautiful youth
under the dignified protection of religion. This is not Sebastian but a
pederastic adolescent painted in his place. Janet Cox-Rearick theorizes that
there is symbolism found in Bronzino's potentially phallic instruments of death
as well:

The arrows, moreover, are not abstract symbols of his
ordeal … but erotic emblems: one has penetrated his body, the other is casually,
but suggestively, held against the pink drapery, the saint’s index finger
curved around and almost touching the arrowhead … These characteristics …suggest
that (the painting) may have been intended to have an ambiguous meaning – an
image, on the one hand, religious, and on the other, homoerotic.7

This figure is also clad in pastel red robes and holds the
shaft of another arrow. Pontormo, however, drags this further into the realm of
eroticism by failing to depict any arrows shot into the saint. Though
this can be related to the theory that Pontormo visualized Sebastian in heaven,
after his death and sainthood had already occurred, it remains a startlingly
calm piece in the style of a portrait, suggesting that his Saint Sebastian is a
painting of a model posing instead of the saint himself. By drawing a
distinction between a true pious depiction and an indulgent portrait of a
‘fake’ Sebastian - as Bronzino obviously does in his title, Pontormo in his
painting - artists could form a defense against accusations of heresy or
disrespect to the religious figure.

Sensualized
painting under the guise of religious or intellectual pursuits extends past
Sebastian's exaggerated depictions to Titian's series of what have, until
recent discourse, been considered Venuses. The soft and charming nudes, painted
with renowned palpability, are claimed, in the scholarly community, to be
Venus. Otto Brendel proposes they are allegories for neo-platonic love,8 but when an immediate emotional, visceral response is
considered, the blatant eroticism and provocative nature of the Venus of Urbinoand others presents
itself readily. Titian's models may have
been prostitutes, courtesans, or ambiguously identified friends (as his mentor Giorgione is known to have utilized them, logically Titian was likely to have done so as well). Painting the
sexualized goddess of love was, as previously mentioned, an excuse to celebrate
human form and nudity. Titian's intent is unlikely to lie in a tribute to
Venus, but simply a portrait - of a friend, lover, or acquaintance. Without her
pagan title, she becomes the feminine equivalent of Bronzino's Young Man as Saint Sebastian: a naked
lady,9 an ordinary human being depicted for pleasure rather than
academia. Pietro Perugino's Saint
Sebastian(fig. 4)

offers a similar sense of humbling intimacy with a taste
of Bronzino's portraiture. His figure, set against a black background, has
luminary textures and is so close to the viewer's space in the canvas that the
experience of the painting grows claustrophobic. There are no distractions:
this is a pure and obvious hagiography, with strands of affection woven through
it.

Even when
Saint Sebastian is painted in what seem to be the throes of death or ecstasy,
or more likely both simultaneously, he still exhibits erotic traits. In Baroque
art, taking Guido Reni’s series as an example, he possesses only what is
essentially a loincloth. The rest of his body is drastically contrasted with a
dark background, typical of theatrical Baroque lighting, alluding to a divine
Caravaggesque glow. He forms a striking image, and a heroic and endearing one
that was conventionally attractive.

Reni displays Sebastian
consistently with his head tossed back in visionary intensity, similar to
depictions of Saint Theresa and even Christ, with eyes cast to the sky and to
the goal he has pursued so fervently. His lips are parted in possible
obscenity, and his features are hyperbolically flushed in an anonymous sketch after
Reni’s painting (fig. 5).

clear
idolatry and exposing composition caught the attention of young aesthete Oscar
Wilde, who, in what is considered one of his first homoerotic writings,10 describes an 1887 viewing of the series in the Palazzo Rosso
of Genoa and notes them in his essay The
Tomb of Keats. Preceding a sonnet composed for John Keats, Wilde writes, “…
Guido's St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown
boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips … raising his eyes with divine,
impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens.”11 Like Reni's early Baroque example, which bridges the
artistic and societal gap between the late Renaissance and the Baroque, Keats
is a beautiful youth slain by consumption before a just time. For the
nineteenth century medievalists and Renaissance fascinators, at least, an early
death for the sake of sustained beauty - found in poetry for Keats and in his
God for Sebastian - is a fashionable martyrdom, and one that deserves to be
painted in a glorified light again and again.

Another
poet, nearly fifty years later, found a morbid grace among the saint's
depiction as well. T.S. Eliot made a visit to Mantegna's Sebastian in the
Palazzo Ca d'Oro and came away with what are considered some of his darkest
works, “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” and “The Death of St. Narcissus.” Much
like the creators and philosophers who developed and shaped the myth before
him, Eliot was drawn to the fatal sublimity and drama presented by Sebastian's
execution. For Eliot, the archetypes of Saint Sebastian and Saint Narcissus
represent similar ideals, and equally attractive ones. Narcissus, a second
century Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, was slandered by accusations of a
horrific and taboo crime, sometimes conjectured to be homosexuality.12 His work on Narcissus uses the subject as a Sebastian
allegory, “dancing” for the lord until Diocletian's arrows finally pierce him.
The poem describes him as young girl:

Caught in the woods by a drunken old man / Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness, / The horror of his own smoothness, / And he felt drunken and old.13

Sebastian,
painted as beautiful and youthful again with his description as a girl, is
poetically, or potentially literally, raped.14 He is objectified - perhaps the old man is emperor
Diocletian - and conventionally effeminized, as almost all post-Middle Ages
interpretations of him are. His loving flesh accepts the arrows, based on
paintings of arching backs and pin-up style posture. Even so, Eliot defends the
heterosexuality of his experiences with the Italian Sebastian paintings in a
letter to Conrad Aiken:

I have studied S. Sebastians - why should anyone paint a beautiful youth and
stick him full of pins (or arrows) unless he felt a little as the hero of my
verse? Only there's nothing homosexual
about this - rather an important difference perhaps - but no one ever painted a
female Sebastian, did they?15

Innumerable
Christian figures have been martyred for their passion of belief, and an
equally immense amount are worshipped in paint, but none are so fundamentally
attractive as Sebastian. Having morphed from a medieval soldier to an ardent
and hot-blooded Adonis who writhes on the cross, Sebastian occupied an ancient
ideal featured at the forefront of visual culture from the Renaissance to
nineteenth-century portraiture. His “purity” and boyishness lent itself to the
pederastic fantasies of humanist masters and workshop dynamics. His unjust
persecution plagued the righteous minds of poets.

This
youthfulness and slight pedophilia may have in actuality existed for Sebastian.
If it is assumed he, in reality, was once young in the company of his emperors,
pederastic conduct is very likely, implied by Voragine's thirteenth century Legenda Aurea. In fact, the soldier
Sebastian “was so well beloved of Diocletian and Maximian, emperors of Rome,
that they made him master and duke of their meiny and power, and always would
have him in their presence.”16

Concrete
causes of Sebastian's sexualization and subsequent iconography include general appeal after his physical canon was altered, his use as a pretext for
indulgent non religious painting and/or sexual acts, and, once his eroticized
image was established, a passion that enticed artists across the field of
humanities. But more philosophical reasons exist in the phenomenon of martyrdom
and glorified sacrifice. Though violent death and suicide are so often socially
condemned, especially by dogmatic religious interpretations, martyrs are honored as saints. The
denunciation of violence is suspended when death is a result of divine love,
because sacrifice is often considered the highest measure of sanctity and
anything done to ascend towards God tends to rise above mortal rules. If the
action brings the actor, or humanity itself, closer to divinity, it is
religiously considered pure of sin. The immense devotion to God that Sebastian possessed was considered passionate and consuming. He craved a consummation of
his faith, a mode to demonstrate his absolute and prioritized love; his “flesh
was in love with the burning arrows”.17 There is such an infatuation with his love, God, that a
sexual quality presents itself. Sexual and divine passion have long been nearly
inseparable. Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Ecstasy
of Saint Theresa connects physical pleasure with faith to lure viewers to
religion, and all encompassing love for God adopts a carnal
quality. Even vows of chastity evoke this concept,
in that one's only love must be God. For visionaries and saints, self-sacrifice
is “an ecstatic union with God in which suffering is finally indistinguishable
from love.”18

It is
debatable whether poets of the past two centuries have focused on and idolized
Sebastian because of this passion and “purity” or because of a morbid fascination
with both death and all that is darkly sensual (evidenced by the increasing
perverseness of Eliot’s early work, especially topics of strangulation in “The
Love Song of Saint Sebastian”). Arthur Schopenhauer describes an artistic
expression of the human spirit in displays of emotion,19 as our natural will to live is often overwhelmed by our
constructed societal expectations and duties. Because this drive behind human
accomplishment is so buried, it is unearthed only by passion. Intense emotion
is a direct result of a fervent will and so inspires belief. This testifies to
the art of poets, actors, and painters, in which the primary goal of the work
is to incite such convictions of will. The inspiration of Saint Sebastian's sacrifice, including the miraculous recovery from his martyrdom which proves a desire for continuation of life, invites passionate portrayals
and viewer reactions. The attempt of past poets to present the grotesque
and taboo as beautiful and impassioned lends Sebastian as a perfect
amalgamation of both.

An
interdisciplinary obsession with the frequently eroticized Saint Sebastian, and
more specifically with the moment of his execution, arises from the intense emotion
his image incites. This feeling, whether sexual and potentially dangerous or
pious and sympathetic, originates in the deviant and violent nature of his
martyrdom. By connecting Sebastian’s sexualization to Renaissance religious
restrictions and the taboo of death itself, the appeal of portraying him for
the sake of painting beauty is apparent. Sebastian functions as a male
Venus, whose homosexual iconography and honorable devastation is directly
connected with his sacrifice.

E. Nowicki is a high school student and hopeful academic residing in the midwest. Her work currently focuses on contradictory feminine constructs in early Arcadian photography and nature in the Grecian ideal.